Design Your Surroundings To Make Good Choices

We often think that achieving a task is just about getting out there and doing it. We believe that if there’s a will, we can find a way towards a goal and no matter what how we start it. But our environment influence in what we choose to do, as opposed to what we want to do. If you have choices around you that are distracting or lead to undesirable outcomes, then it becomes harder to make the right choices. For example in my workplace is instant noodles, everytime someone cooks it then people will start to find something to eat which distract them from work.

On the other side of the coin, having an environment that strictly offers you productive choices allows you to only do what’s best for yourself and of course, your tasks. So if you want to work on improving your working habits, take a look around you and see how you can make it more convenient to do so. For example, using the profile function from Google Chrome would help us separate which browser is for private and which is for work (picture below).

Most of the time, you can have many ideas from environmental cues to work towards an outcome faster and easier. This can be applied in different aspects of life:

To get work done, minimize distractions that take away from your focus, as I showed you above with tab manager.

If you want to eat better, put healthier foods and water within close reach, eat and drink will refresh your mind because you can move you body a little bit after an hour of working.

When you try to persuade someone to perform a task, explain and set it up so that it’s convenient for the person to do so. Most of the time you properly looking for help in different departments or groups, try to cut your task into smaller pieces and easy to achieve.

Wanting something done is not enough. If you want a certain outcome, you need an environment that gets you closer towards it. There will be another post about working Effective is different from Efficient.

Changing Your Environment Not Your Company

Making changes to your environment makes it easier to do what’s right without having to think about staying motivated. If you can set up your surroundings to make better decisions easier, then you can set yourself up to practice better habits.

Often, we think that change comes from within or from self-study or read books or seminars. We believe that achieving a goal is about changing ourselves and the way we think. But we lack our attention to the fact that optimizing our environment to make better choices significantly impacts our actions.

The changes we make may seem small initially. For instance, it might not seem like much to move a book you want to read from the shelf to your desk but every piece that you move with the spirit of optimizing your desk, your working behavior with positive change.What did you think of this list? Share with your friends and family to find out if they have found the woman they should marry!

What did you think of changing your desk and improving your working behavior? Share with your friends, family, and coworkers to find out how many things did they changed to make them work better.